ClearPath

Inspiration

Starting a small business—whether it's a cozy local café, a home-based bakery, or a mobile food truck—requires navigating dozens of municipal, county, and state permits. Information is fragmented across government portals, and missing a single prerequisite dependency (such as applying for a food permit before completing health inspections or tax registration) can cause weeks of costly delay, financial penalties, or application rejection. We built ClearPath to turn fragmented municipal bureaucracy into a clear, optimized, and safe roadmap for aspiring entrepreneurs.

What it does

ClearPath is an AI-assisted Civic Tech planning engine for small businesses. It models local permit requirements as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and automatically:

1. Calculates the Critical Path & Timeline: Determines the absolute minimum days and costs needed to launch.
2. Identifies Parallel Work Streams: Highlights tasks that can be completed simultaneously to save weeks of waiting.
3. Auto-Injects Prerequisites & Warns of Pitfalls: Ensures partial selections never leave out required prerequisite permits.
4. Fast-Track Preparation Simulator: Interactive toggles show how pre-arranging documents (e.g. lease agreements, certifications) reduces project duration.
5. Cites Official Government Sources: Every step links directly to official Austin, TX, and State of Texas government portals.
6. One-Click Checklist Export: Generates an actionable, timestamped Markdown checklist with steps, warnings, and official links.

How we built it

• Core Framework & Styling: React 19, TypeScript 6.0, Vite 8.1, Tailwind CSS v4, and Framer Motion for modern, responsive micro-animations.
• Graph & Critical Path Engine (computePlan): Built from scratch in TypeScript utilizing Kahn's algorithm for deterministic topological sorting and critical path calculation.
• Testing & Quality Assurance: 16 comprehensive unit tests using Vitest verifying graph acyclicity, parallel timeline computations, and fast-track savings.
• Privacy & Security First: Designed as a 100% offline-first client architecture with zero tracking, zero personal data collection, and a hardened serverless boundary enforcing HTTPS domain allowlisting (austintexas.gov).

Challenges we ran into

Modeling messy, real-world city regulations into strict mathematical DAGs was challenging. Municipal rules often contain conditional requirements and implicit prerequisites. Designing an algorithm that could gracefully auto-inject missing dependencies while detecting and failing closed on potential cycles required rigorous graph logic and extensive unit testing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

• 100% Test Coverage on Core Logic: 16 passing Vitest unit tests verifying graph algorithms and edge cases.
• Instantaneous Recalculations: Interactive gantt charts and route maps that update in real-time as users adjust fast-track toggles or business scenarios.
• Zero-Privacy Compromise: Delivering rich, dynamic planning tools entirely client-side without storing user addresses or personal data.

What we learned

We gained a deep appreciation for how algorithmic concepts like Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and Critical Path Methodology (CPM) can be directly applied to Civic Tech to solve real-world economic and bureaucratic friction for small business owners.

What's next for ClearPath

• Calendar Integration: Exporting scheduled milestone dates directly to .ics files for Google Calendar / Apple Calendar.
• Multi-City Expansion: Extending the schema to support other major municipalities across Texas and the US.
• Multi-Language Support: Adding Spanish and Vietnamese localizations to better serve diverse entrepreneur communities.

Built With

• civic-tech
• dag
• framer-motion
• google-antigravitiy
• node.js
• react
• tailwindcss
• typescript
• vite
• vitest